One Righteous Man : Samuel Battle and the Shattering of the Color Line in New York (9780807012611)

by Browne, Arthur

  At 2 a.m. on a sweltering August night, Officer Robert Thorpe had moved to arrest May Enoch at the corner of Forty-First Street and Eighth Avenue. Enoch was twenty years old and black. Thorpe presumed that she was a prostitute. She was not. Enoch was a young woman waiting to go home with the man she lived with, Arthur Harris. A fresh arrival from Virginia, Harris was trying to beat the heat in McBride’s Saloon. He saw Thorpe grab Enoch. Thorpe was in plainclothes, so Harris presumed that Thorpe was assaulting Enoch. The two men fought. Thorpe battered Harris with a nightstick. Harris drew a knife, fatally stabbed Thorpe and fled.

  Sixty officers from the local stationhouse gathered at Thorpe’s house to pay respects. They were in bad temper. Outside, not far away, a fight broke out between two men—one black, one white. A mob pounced on the black man and, as reported by the New York Daily Tribune, the cry went up that a “nigger chase” was on. “Men and women poured by the hundreds from the neighboring tenements. Negroes were set upon wherever they could be found and brutally beaten.”26

  Gangs pulled blacks from streetcars to pummel them. A man threw a clothesline over a lamppost for a lynching. A call went out to hunt down well-known blacks. Cops cheered on the white marauders or joined the attacks until a drenching thunderstorm restored peace.

  In the aftermath, there were furious newspaper editorials, protests, and lawsuits. The board of police commissioners assigned a committee to investigate. The panel took testimony, barring lawyers for black complainants from cross-examining police witnesses and crediting the word of officers over their victims. That, officially, was the end of the matter.

  The New York Times saw “no signs that the citizen of African descent is distrusted or disliked.” Quite to the contrary, the paper opined: “He is generally well treated in public, and accorded his legal rights without resentment. His crude melodies and childlike antics are more than tolerated in the music halls of the best class.”27

  BATTLE’S WANDERINGS in the city passed quickly. Idled by the completion of the America’s Cup, he encountered a tout on Forty-Second Street who spoke glowingly of a waiter’s position in a hotel a few miles north of the city. Battle went eagerly, but the job was short-lived. In defiance of orders, he took meals in the kitchen rather than in the help’s quarters and was fired. Scouting again, he heard about Yale University and headed up the coast to New Haven.

  Yale was like nothing Battle had ever seen. The campus was a collection of magnificent buildings, some dating back two centuries, some newly built in celebration of the school’s upcoming bicentennial. The new structures included a dining hall whose administrators accepted Battle onto their staff. His place was clear. He was to meet the needs of the best and brightest of white America’s sons of privilege. Blacks worked but did not study at Yale; only forty-five were enrolled in the school’s undergraduate college in the century that started in 1850.28

  In the third week of October 1901, a bulletin shocked America: Theodore Roosevelt had dined in the White House with Booker T. Washington. No president had ever afforded such hospitality to an African American. It seemed impossible to Battle, but it was true. Washington had been a guest in the national residence.

  Son of a black cook and a white man, Booker Taliaferro Washington had been born into slavery. Following the Civil War, as a sixteen-year-old, he labored in a saltworks and a coal mine. After two miners talked about a school where blacks could work to pay their way, he made a five-hundred-mile trek to the Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute in eastern Virginia.

  With a mission of training blacks to become teachers, Hampton instilled a Congregationalist work ethic born of a sense that slavery had conditioned its former prisoners to be lazy and hedonistic. Washington excelled, and he discovered his life’s work as the creative genius behind the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama.

  Relying on student labor, he built the school from almost nothing and became a proponent of providing blacks with an industrial education, essentially training students to be tradesmen, such as carpenters and masons. Washington had no shortage of applicants, but he did have a shortage of money. He became adept at fund-raising, eventually recruiting as patrons Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, and J. P. Morgan. America’s industrialists were happy to give to the right black man, and Washington fit the bill. In 1895, while Roosevelt was president of New York City’s board of police commissioners, Washington introduced the country to his philosophy in a groundbreaking address that essentially offered a racial bargain with four terms:

  He accepted the dominant white view that blacks were ill-prepared to participate in American citizenship.

  He rejected any insistence on immediate civil and political rights.

  He called on whites to bring blacks into the economic mainstream by supporting the kind of skills-based education offered at Tuskegee.

  And he took on faith that American society would become welcoming once blacks were productive members of the labor force.

  The enduring image drawn by Washington in this “Atlanta Compromise” was that of the races as separate fingers on a united hand. He told his white audience:

  As we have proved our loyalty to you in the past, in nursing your children, watching by the sick-bed of your mothers and fathers, and often following them with tear-dimmed eyes to their graves, so in the future, in our humble way, we shall stand by you with a devotion that no foreigner can approach, ready to lay down our lives, if need be, in defense of yours, interlacing our industrial, commercial, civil, and religious life with yours in a way that shall make the interests of both races one. In all things that are purely social we can be as separate as the fingers, yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress.

  Whites heard from Washington the ratification of their superior place in society. Blacks heard the coming of a leader to replace the deceased Frederick Douglass. Praise flowed from seemingly all quarters. President Grover Cleveland sent a congratulatory note: “Your words cannot fail to delight and encourage all who wish well for your race.”

  The judgments of history have been harsher to a man who came to be known both as the “Wizard of Tuskegee” and as “The Great Accommodator.” On the one hand, Washington was a master political tactician and educator; on the other, he avoided antagonizing whites even to the point of remaining silent in the face of lynchings. He can be praised for realism in recognizing the futility of all-out war with a society that tolerated racial murder. And he can be condemned for accepting the unacceptable.

  Political leaders courted Washington in pursuit of African American votes. Roosevelt was no exception. Elevated from vice president to president on the assassination of William McKinley, he hosted Washington in the hope that Washington would communicate to America’s blacks that they had an ally in the White House. The dinner took place on Roosevelt’s thirty-second day in office. At the table were the president, First Lady Edith Roosevelt, a friend of Roosevelt’s, and Washington, whose arrival and departure went unnoticed until an Associated Press reporter checked the day’s White House guest list. After midnight, the dispatch went out: “Booker T. Washington, of Tuskegee, Alabama, dined with the President last evening.”

  The South seethed. The Memphis Scimitar declared: “The most damnable outrage which has ever been perpetrated by any citizen of the United States was committed yesterday by the President, when he invited a nigger to dine with him at the White House.”29

  A few days later, Yale’s administration delivered a second jolt to Battle and his fellow blacks on the dining hall staff as they prepared to serve meals at a celebration of the university’s two hundredth birthday: the invited dignitaries included Washington and Roosevelt.

  The date, October 23, 1901, proved to be a glorious autumn day. The trees offered reds and yellows as if in fiery congratulations. At the right moment, Battle made his way to a vantage point from which to watch the dignitaries and students in a long procession to Yale’s Hyperion Theatre. University presidents joined renowned scholars, government leade
rs joined military commanders, artists joined writers, lawyers joined bishops, the Secretary of State joined the US Chief Justice, Woodrow Wilson joined Mark Twain, and there was the president of the United States and there was the leader of black America. Battle spotted Washington easily.30 His lonely skin tone was impossible to miss among the sixty-two white men who were awarded honorary degrees. And there was Roosevelt, with his stout bearing and proud gusto. Battle viewed him as a hero and would count him one for the rest of Battle’s life. Soon, he would express his appreciation face-to-face.

  NEW HAVEN OFFERED Battle the Yale dining hall and little else. Judging that he would find greater opportunities in New York, he headed down the coast determined “to try my luck there permanently.”

  It is easy to imagine him, now nineteen years old and feeling himself on the make. Still, it is just as easy to see him as a mark for the hustlers who played the city’s angles. Unsurprisingly, his recollections included a bit of a fleecing:

  My first experience with politics as a young man came only a few days after I had first set foot in New York. Walking along a midtown street with a friend on a primary election day, we were approached by a white man who asked us, “Would you like to make two dollars?”

  Naturally we said, “Yes.”

  The man handed us two marked ballots and instructed us on how to put them into the ballot box. After we had “voted” we stood down the street a ways from the polls and watched him pay others, Negro and white, to do the same thing. Never having voted before, I had not learned then to take my ballot seriously, and did not realize the import of what I was doing.

  Battle’s return to New York brought a happy reunion with his younger sister Sophia, who was living with a family in East New York, a countrified area of Brooklyn miles from the commercial center near the bridge. He took lodgings there, set out to find work, and encountered a revelation that would influence the central course of his life. More than a decade earlier, while Brooklyn was still an independent city, seminal African American civil rights leaders and brave blacks had waged a hard struggle to break the color line of its police force. They had succeeded—but only to a point, Battle discovered.

  It took gutsy, farsighted vision in the late 1880s to imagine opening the Brooklyn force to African Americans—and Timothy Thomas Fortune, the man who took up the challenge, was nothing if not a gutsy visionary.

  Born into slavery in 1856, Fortune was then a generation removed from Irish and Seminole contributions to his blood. After the Civil War, his father, Emmanuel Fortune, supported the family by leather tanning and by farming land he had been given by a white friend. Newly prominent, Emmanuel was elected to the Florida state legislature. Swiftly, though, hopes of freedom died in the horrors of Reconstruction.

  The rise of the Ku Klux Klan forged Fortune’s youth in blood. His father, a special target, fortified the house so that the family slept in a loft from which Emmanuel could drop through a trap door to return gunfire. Once, Timothy Thomas missed a Sunday-school picnic that became the site of an atrocity.

  “All were gathered at the picnic grounds and enjoying to the full their first experience of the kind,” he recalled decades later, “when a party of white hoodlums hidden in the surrounding forest, opened a deadly fire with shotguns on the women and children and the very few men in the gathering. . . . The ground was littered with dead and maimed children and grownups.”31

  Emmanuel Fortune moved the family to Jacksonville, Florida, where he continued to serve in the legislature. Having excelled at a Freedmen’s Bureau school in Marianna, under the tutelage of two Union soldiers, Timothy Thomas enrolled in a black public school called the Stanton Institute, to be taught by two women from New England.

  Again he shone academically, but he stayed only a short time. Instead he embarked on a series of jobs: legislative clerk, postal worker, a newspaper printer’s apprentice, railroad mail route agent, and federal customs inspector. Eventually, Fortune’s wanderings brought him to reading the law at Howard University at night while working as a compositor for the People’s Advocate, a black newspaper in Washington. There, he began to write for publication and found the career that led him to New York in 1880 and then to the editorship, between 1881 and 1907, of three successive black-oriented papers, the Globe, the Freeman, and the New York Age. In those positions, he emerged as one of the great United States newspaper editors, but he remains largely unsung because he focused on—and championed—the causes of black America.32

  Described by a scholar as “a Byronically handsome African-American who once seemed destined to inherit the mantle of the great Frederick Douglass,” Fortune was an unparalleled journalistic crusader.33 His newspapers chronicled the evils of Jim Crow and political developments of special interest to blacks. His uncompromising editorials made the Age the country’s most influential publication among African Americans. And Fortune did more.

  He mentored W. E. B. Du Bois, who was to become the intellectual godfather of the modern civil rights movement, and gave Du Bois his first assignments as a newspaper correspondent. He gave Ida B. Wells a platform in the Age to crusade against lynching after vigilantes destroyed her newspaper in Memphis. He founded the National Afro-American League, precursor to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). He became confidant, collaborator, and critic of Booker T. Washington.34

  And, as the 1890s approached, Fortune joined three path breakers in devising a strategy to integrate Brooklyn’s police force. Philip A. White was the first black to receive a degree from the New York College of Pharmacy. Charles A. Dorsey was one of the few black school principals in Brooklyn. T. McCants Stewart was a minister and lawyer who had been one of the first black students at the University of South Carolina.

  First, Fortune’s group needed the right men to apply for the job, who were suited to police work, who were capable of achieving a high score on the civil service examination, and who would have the strength to overcome the sure hostility of white cops and citizens. They chose Wiley Grenada Overton to lead the way.

  The youngest of at least eight children in a free black family, Overton was born on the eve of the Civil War in Elizabeth City, North Carolina.35 In the war’s ebb, at the age of seven, he began his education at a normal school whose mission was to prepare blacks to become teachers. He graduated at fourteen, taught for two years, and then, still only sixteen, followed a brother north to Brooklyn, the independent city across the river from New York. He resumed his studies, this time at a blacks-only grammar school. After graduating for a second time, Overton went to work for a dry-goods merchant, soon taking charge of the company’s sample room. He married, fathered two daughters, and became active in his church. Eventually, he established a successful undertaking business.

  Few members of the police force were as well educated as Overton was; fewer still had built successful careers. To Fortune and his colleagues, Overton’s willingness to sacrifice his livelihood at the age of thirty-one for the greater good of the race was a godsend. They had no doubt that, with proper study, he would ace the hiring test—and he did. In 1891, Overton’s name appeared toward the top of the rank-order appointment list. The commissioner was sure to reach him as he called men for mandatory physicals. Fortune arranged for a doctor to examine Overton in order to prevent the police surgeon from disqualifying him on a pretext. The doctor issued a certificate of good health.

  The Brooklyn Daily Eagle sent a reporter to plumb the motivations of the black man who had dared to claim a place on the force. So as not to leave readers guessing, its reporter wrote of Overton: “The race which he belongs to is made plain in the most pronounced way by the color of his skin—he is quite dark.” The story included this colloquy:

  “What induced you to make the effort to secure the position on the police force?”

  “Well, I don’t really remember. I had been thinking of it for the longest time. I believed that there ought to be some colored policemen, and I was more or less all the t
ime talking about it to my friends. In Philadelphia there are fifty-six colored officers. Boston has eight or ten. In Chicago they are numerous. Trenton, Camden and Newark are not without them, and now that Brooklyn has got into line, there are no cities in the North where my people dwell in respectable numbers, except New York, without black policemen.”

  Overton also predicted:

  I think the treatment I receive will in a great measure depend upon how I carry myself, how I deal with those with whom I come in contact. The worst which I will be made to suffer will be the staring of the curious and probably I’ll have to take some guying from the gamins on the streets. The novelty of my appearance, however, will soon wear away and until it does I guess I can stand the staring without blushing too loud, and, as I do not drink and am not hasty in my temper, the street arab will never succeed in making me angry.36

  Critical of no one and suffused by good will, Overton drew a pleased review from the reporter. He left the interview “impressed with the idea that no city would suffer from having on its police negroes like Officer Overton.” Shortly, Commissioner Henry I. Hayden appointed twenty-two police officers. “He passed a good examination,” Hayden said, “and as the law makes no distinction in regard to color I do not see why there should be any question as to my duty in the matter.”

  The following day the Eagle declared in a supportive editorial: “There are colored policemen in plenty in states beyond the old Mason and Dixon’s line. If the Southerners can stand the admixture why cannot the Northerners?”37